Isobella Duffy runs a bed and breakfast west of the River Foyle on the north side of Derry—or Londonderry, depending on your persuasion. She tolerates the misfortune of living barely a mile inside the confines of Northern Ireland, technically Britain, by ranting to captive audiences at breakfast. The house should’a been in the Free State. A still-smoking plate of egg, sausage, and tomato meets the table with a clatter that could pass for accidental. Would’a been, except for those damn city walls. She gets positive reviews on Booking.com for “great banter” among those who support her position on a united Ireland—and among foreigners who find it enchanting, all part of the experience. “A pleasure to meet a ‘real’ Derry girl!” writes a guest named Kevin. Loyalists give fewer stars, on average.

But the Brexit vote was a step too far. Isobella mourned for a few days, then listed her house for sale in protest of the “hard border,” with its checkpoints that threatened cut her off from the rest of the island—the rest of the world, it seemed to her.

A pedestrian “Peace Bridge” finished in 2011 connects the city’s Protestants with Catholics like Isobella, divided as they were into the so-called Waterside and Derry side across the River Foyle. The peace agreement of 1998 did little to resolve latent resentments, invisible as the modern border, so neighborhoods stayed mostly segregated. Certain loyalists east of the river painted their curbs red, white, and blue, flew the Union Jack, and held raucous marches and bonfires every July commemorating the 1690 victory of Protestant King William III over Catholic King James II. Certain republicans painted murals, built memorials to Catholics killed during the three decades of the Troubles, and lit bonfires of their own. Mutual antagonism only sporadically bubbles over into open hostility, though. So the tourists come, and take pictures of the bridge, and pose in front of conflict murals marked historical.

When I check in to Isobella’s on a cool July day in 2018, dissident republicans have just thrown amateur petrol bombs at police and a passing van on the Derry side, but most locals say they are a small minority—disenfranchised kids seeking attention, really. More than two hundred thousand people from across Europe, feeling secure enough, have congregated on Queen’s Quay for the weeklong Foyle Maritime Festival. It is the first time anyone I meet can remember such a crowd in the city.

Isobella’s house faces the river, but willow grows so high above a squat stone wall across the street—more than five feet per year, sometimes—that it obscures her view of the water. It is easier to make out the Waterside’s shops and houses in the winter, when the leaves are gone. Her Airbnb listing doesn’t advertise the view. It reads: “love people, I am a people person,” with a blurred image of a silver-haired, straight-faced woman slumped in a chair who seems to be trying hard to convince guests of the opposite. I am the first guest in two years to arrive on Isobella’s doorstep through Airbnb. She couldn’t believe it when “the Airbnb people” told her I was coming, and I couldn’t believe nothing else in Derry was available for a decent price. The other guests, I later learn, come through Booking.com, where hosts can more easily hide their eccentricities behind pictures of beds and standardized lists of amenities.

But I am among the reviewers who find it all enchanting—the replica of Free Derry Corner in the sitting room and the Irish flag draped with the Palestinian one over the door, in solidarity, Isobella explains when I eye it. I book an extra four nights in person and offer to edit the listing to attract more guests. Isobella huffs: No thanks. She’s moving to France before Brexit locks her in to the United Kingdom, anyway. I see the outline of her figure outside on my second night, standing alone on the front lawn just beyond the “for sale” sign, watching fireworks from the festival. It’s as if the world has come to Derry. Isobel stays through the finale, until a straggling pink burst fades to a faint flourish of smoke. Then she softly shuts the front door.

***

The next morning I have an interview with Isobella’s old friend Gerry, a former current affairs columnist for the Derry Journal. Isobella set it up for me when I told her I was researching Brexit for my think tank. Gerry has forgotten Isobella’s house number but carries himself, when he finds the place, like a member of the family. Isobella brings coffee and a plate of petit fours, bought for the occasion. She’s known Gerry since her tomboy days, when she learned to talk back to Protestant men who called her a dirty taig on the playground. And through her teenage years, when her idea of fun was a riot in the Bogside. The days when women would put buckets of vinegar and rags outside their doors for fighters to drape over their noses and mouths when the British Army deployed CS gas that filled the streets, and leave rinsed-out glass bottles on their stoops for bombs. Isobella remembers the bomb-making well: a little washing powder at the bottom, then the petrol poured over it. A rag stuffed in the top. The powder made the flammable solution stick to the skin of the target. She widens her eyes and tilts her head in mock horror when she tells me this.

“I remember her as a wee good lookin’ wee thing in the Point Inn,” says Gerry, arranging the cushions of Isobella’s couch around himself. Isobella’s silvery-yellow hair is dry and combed straight today, the ends curled slightly in toward the freckles that cover the fleshy part of her cheeks.

“How times have changed! How times have changed!” Isobella whoops, setting the coffee down in front of him. Gerry erupts in laughter that enlists the abdomen and limbs, and Isobella builds on the comedic momentum she perceives out of the corner of her eye. “We go that way; we don’t go that way! We go that way!” This statement, with the associated nods of a tired face, is too accurate for another outburst. Gerry takes a breath, and Isobella looks directly at him. “The time’s changed. Just think, the time’s changed.”

“Those were the days, though, Isobel, weren’t they?”

“Oh God, I tell you what, Gerry, they were.”

“You were safe in them days, weren’t ye?”

“You were. Actually in spite of the Troubles, you were probably safer.”

“Oh, you were safer! I’ve always said that. I’d go back to the ’70s tomorrow.” Isobella starts clearing dishes in the breakfast nook. “Oh my God, yes. You were safer, to be quite honest.”

“I, I remember, like,” Gerry reaches for a mug, “I lived in Creggan. Used to walk home, you were dead, dead safe… But you wouldn’t have felt safe in Belfast.”

“Not at all, not at all. It’s like even this, the wee bit of bother we had ourselves here—and it was worse in Belfast.”

“It was always worse in Belfast.”

“Always worse.” Isobella is shooing the dogs out to the foyer with her foot, with hands full of plates.

“You could be livin’ here, and where the new bridge is could be, there could be a Catholic area, and where the new bridge is would be the Protestant area. And if you were walking through the wrong area at night...”

“The direction you’re goin’ tells the person you are,” says Isobella. “But Belfast it was here, here, here. You know. The butchers used to sit—‘cause I read all the books about them—they used to sit in taxis and when they see which direction you were headin’ they knew…”

“If you were heading out of town, and headin’ up toward the falls, toward the back of CastleCourt, you were a Catholic.”

“You’re a Catholic, straightaway. And the butcher was half-and-half… his… was it his mother was Catholic and…?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“… and his father was Protestant? So he had to try to be doubly try to be more vicious to fit in with his people,” says Isobella.

She leaves us to discuss the issue in abstractions and numbers.

But she keeps thinking about this fact: that she is becoming a stranger. We discuss it later. The basic facts of a person’s parents and neighborhood don’t have much power to bind anymore, even though the old battle lines still divide. It is the worst of both worlds. Catholic ranks are split: There are the Sinn Fein supporters: Sinners, says Isobella, a self-described Sinner for life. There are the SDLP voters, sellouts who’ve forgotten the Troubles. There are the dizzies, republican dissidents who hang out behind the Bogside Inn, the ones responsible for the latest violence. She prefers the term Coca-Colas, after the brand’s commercials, for all their ridiculous fantasizing about the world. I’d like to start a boot camp for ‘em. Teach ‘em what the fight was really about.

Protestants, of course, are still corrupt through and through. Isobella enunciates each letter of the leading Protestant party—D. U. P.—as if teaching a child the alphabet. “And Theresa May… that bitch,” she says. “England acts like it’s still Britannia ruling the waves. Who do they think they are? Nothing but an inkblot on the map.” She holds up her thumb and pointer finger and looks, squinting, between the small space between them. “I wish I could just… erase it.” She squeezes her fingers together and laughs wildly.

***

Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton psychologist, has a theory about the remembering self and the experiencing self. The remembering one—the one that’s less concerned with enjoying a moment than remembering it—controls us. It’s why we often take pictures. It’s why we choose the exotic trips, the thrills we can talk about later, over mundane pleasures.

Those were the days.

Days of slaughter in the streets, even—remembered.

Kahneman’s studies don’t explain the roots of this irrationality.

But the remembering self dominates, I think, because it pieces together our very identity out of handfuls of memories. Gives that identity meaning. Situates us in a place, among a people, where we feel safe.

You were safe in them days, weren’t ye?

Safety, the way we remember it, is the absence of physical suffering, yes. But it is also a sense of being home.

***

I once studied The Troubles during a course on insurgencies for new officers in the US Army. There was a sense of urgency in the way we newly minted lieutenants chose our terminology, positioned the laminated graphics on oversized maps. We wanted, through the lens of past conflicts, to understand where we were going, how we would fit in when we got there. There was an unspoken sense that it would be a defining point in our lives.

I was among the first of my class of trainees to deploy to Afghanistan—specifically, to a plywood box of desks and screens. My new colleagues—three Captains, a Major, and Sergeant First Class Rod—and I would be in there, typically, when the daily inbound recoilless rifle rounds and rockets came whistling overhead. Hearing the whistle was a relief. That meant the device had a little further to go before piercing its target, spraying shrapnel, they said.

“I love you guys!” Rod would shout with enough varying inflection and high pitch to indicate playful confidence. After a few weeks of that, when the odds felt favorable, I shouted it back. And I meant it.

Once, after the boom, in the giddy glow of being safe together, Rod announced as we walked to the bunker that the group of us wouldn’t speak when we got back. Not in the same way. He wanted to prepare me.

I return to Europe nine months after arriving in Afghanistan, and I catch a ride from the reception to the apartment I rent downtown. Painters have moved the furniture to the middle of the rooms. A trashcan is turned upside down, contents strewn about. I turn on the heat and stare at the ceiling in the quiet, feel an empty sense of safety I’m not ready for. The calming roar of helicopters, the predictability of the incoming fire alarm, the Captains’ tired pranks: Who am I here without them?

***

I am transferred to another unit months later, where I am responsible for forming a mission statement and building a team of soldiers new to the Army and new to Europe. They are part of three worlds simultaneously: An Army that says it is their family. An actual family, somewhere in Ohio or Nevada or Texas. And Italy, the adventure everyone dreams of when they sign up. They can choose where to manufacture memories, invest. No choice is completely reliable, I want to tell them. But I am not sure I understand that yet myself.

My remembering self feels like it’s at capacity. I’ve taken to traveling with a book to Italian farm stays over long weekends when we aren’t in the field, while other young single officers hike Cinque Terre or explore Dubrovnik. Those were the days, they’ll tell their children someday. They’ll have pictures to prove it.

I start studying Italian from a CD while driving to work.

Look at the colors of my life. Guarda i colori della mia vita. The colors of my life. The deeper conversations will come.

I do the associated grammar lessons in the café beneath my apartment, between the slowly flowing Fiume Retrone and the Basilica Palladiana.

“What do you do?” Gigi, the owner, asks me one evening. I have become a regular, always ordering the first caffe I ever tried and never making it further down the menu. I cannot imagine a concoction more perfect.

“Soldato,” I say.

Gian, another regular, has the same question for me another night. He is taking a break from writing a play and trying to decide whether to date a woman his age who lives nearby or a girl in Germany. I think I’ve gotten that right. The deeper conversations will come, I tell myself.

“Paratrooper,” I say this time.

“What?”

I pantomime a jump, then lift my arms over my head in a parachute shape. I rock left and right and sink down into my seat. I see in his eyes that he has decided to be my friend.

Gigi’s wife Carla starts calling me soldato gentile. I don’t need to look up its meaning, but I write it down in my workbook anyway.

When I leave Italy, and the Army, my remembering self buys a plaque with our unit flag and insignia, packs away every uniform and award. My Italian friends from the café throw me a party in the square, under the lights of the basilica and the statue of Palladio. They give me a tin of coffee grounds that I decide to freeze for a special occasion.

I pass through O’Hare, where the passport control officer says, “Welcome home.” It has the confident ring of truth to it. I sit in the hot sun in my parents’ backyard, drinking iced tea, for a long time that afternoon.

***

I am headed to a church service Sunday morning, and Isobella wants me to know that visitors—maybe from the same church!—dropped off two Bibles for guest rooms a few days ago.

“Were they Gideons?” I ask. She lights up.

“How did you know that?” She has examined the gold lettering on the binding, the feather-light tissue pages. She produces one from the kitchen and cracks open the stiff cover. “Who are they? They’re connected to the Mormons, are they?” She doesn’t like the vulnerability of not knowing, but she also wants to know the answer. Who are their people? Where is their land? I tell her what I know, which is not much.

The Gideons sent miniature camouflaged Bibles to my unit in Afghanistan. Boxes of them. I found that I needed something bigger, so I bought a thick, paperback English Standard Version and sometimes read it while sitting outside against the bunker’s sandbags.

The story starts and ends in a garden. A river flows through the garden city at the end, in Revelation, and the leaves of the trees that grow beside it are for the healing of the nations. The rest, in between, is fall and redemption, fall and redemption. The people long for their garden home, with the God who is knowable and the crystal clear water with the healing leaves. There are many promises that they will find it.

Hostile factions formed in response to the same story made the garden and the river seem far away. I thought about that a lot, sitting against the sandbags.

“I read the Koran,” Isobella says, unprompted, “but I don’t like what it has to say about women.” She replaces the Gideons’ gift back on the table.

“I have Protestant friends, too. They know my policies and I know theirs, but that doesn’t stop us being friends,” she says. “Anyway, religion is shit.”

I am running late. “Say 20 for me!” Isobella laughs from the front door, waving. I don’t bother telling her that it’s not my custom to count prayers. She waits until I’ve pulled away to disappear inside.

***

At breakfast the next morning, an Irish country song about “Old Tyrone” plays from Isobella’s Bush radio. I am in the nook with a French couple that checked in the night before. I have been studying French, which has supplanted Italian in the language-learning part of my brain. I haven’t talked to my friends from the Italian café in a few years now. I try to understand the French people’s conversation.

Isobella gets all of us talking, in English, when she enters with coffee. The French people ask about the “for sale” sign on the lawn. “I’ve gotten quite religious in the past few months,” Isobella says. “I pray every morning, dear Jesus, please let this house be sold.” Hands clasped, she returns to the kitchen, and I ask the couple where they’re from.

“The South of France,” says the woman.

“Oh! Isobella’s future home.” I tell them the name of her town—Quillan—and they share a smile.

“That’s not so… French,” says the man. “It’s basically in Spain.”

Isobella returns with a small fry for the Frenchman.

“I had to be nice to them,” Isobella says, after they pay and leave for Belfast. “They’re my future neighbors.” She won’t start learning French until she gets to Quillan. “It is important to know the patois,” she says.

“Why don’t you stay in Ireland?” I ask. I am trying to reconcile Isobella’s fierce Irishness with her cosmopolitan views.

“I want to be part of it—the whole big thing,” Isobella says. The European Union. The world. A big, chaotic world of opportunity.

The Irish flags, the statues, the photos: They’ll all ship to France in a container. The best parts will remain as memories. The further dilution of Irish identity will happen when she’s gone—when she’s no longer making memories so much as experiencing. Even an identity staked out for a lifetime, invested in, has its limits.

Isobella’s new B&B will be three stories high, a short walk from the beach, with fruit trees out front. The ground floor, a giant courtyard, will be overrun with plants. That’s where I’ll serve an Irish breakfast. The second floor will house families, apartment-style, and the third floor will have an additional two rooms. She’s already made an impression on the mayor and his wife through a fortuitous meeting in a café, she says. The mayor immediately approved her application to buy—a strange prerequisite for foreigners in small French towns, she explains.

“I’ll be an immigrant there,” she says. “It’s not my land. I know that.” She is shooing the dogs again.

“But I think they’ll like me.”

***

I am sitting in the Bogside’s Don Bar and having trouble understanding the accent of a man next to me who rents bounce castles and sells furniture. His bounce castle warehouse is on the Irish side of the border, and his furniture store is on the British side, I think. Brexit might force him to choose. He gets frustrated with me asking him to repeat things and goes out back for a cigarette.

A man who introduces himself as Mack has been listening and has the problem boiled down to its essence. “Europe’s about to explode. It’s coming at us like a freight train.” He sets down his stout.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Our little world is gone… the world I come from. The super-state frightens people,” he says.

Mack thinks sealing this part of the island off will be good for everyone, maybe force them to get along. He was away, in England, for much of the Troubles.

“Are you a Catholic?” I ask.

“I’m a child of God… that’s it. I don’t do that stuff.”

After a smoke, Mack will go to the Foyle Maritime Festival, pay for one of the advertised canoe trips down the river. Have an experience. Not worry about remembering it.

***

“Hey! You must’ve said that prayer for me!” Isobella says when I descend the stairs with my suitcase to check out. “Or maybe it’s them Bibles I’ve got in the house now.” Her realtor has called with news: A prospective buyer wants to know if Isobella will come down a bit on the price.

She hands me a business card. The call has made her especially cheerful. But I also think she likes me.

I tell her I’ll try to visit in France. I mean it.

“I hope I can remember to stay on the left-hand side of the road,” I say, walking to my car.

“Don’t say that!” Isobella pants. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the little donkey.”

I call my mom on a soaring highway that crosses the Foyle north of the Peace Bridge. My dad, at my insisting, is piecing together our history on Ancestry.com. I’d wanted to visit the Irish city that our ancestor, a man named Christopher, decided to leave—maybe look around for signs of my people, gauge my level of connectedness to the place—but I needed specifics. My mom can’t pull him away from the tree and its multiplying forks now. You’re a fifth-generation Texan, she reminds me.

Today, I think to myself, driving across Northern Ireland, I am free of all that. Soldato gentile, maybe. Maybe just gentile, kind. Child of God.

I breathe in deep when I reach the inimitable coast. I don’t take pictures.